And it’s an impulse that can also be found in the French ‘Nouveau Roman’ (literally “new novel”) that flourished in the 1950’s, in which the significance of objects is stressed above that of human motivation or action. Alain Robbe-Grillet, the movement’s leading light, wrote that it was his ambition to;
try to construct a solider, more immediate world to take the place of this universe of meanings . . . so that the first impact of gestures and objects will be there before that are something, and they will still be there afterwards, hard, unalterable, ever present.
To Robbe-Grillet, a lack of solidity encourages acts of interpretation which dilute the object’s meaning by introducing possibilities. Basically, he wants to return dignity to the physical world by stopping people poking about beneath its surface. In this scheme, the object’s appearance is its meaning. What you see is what you get. And it’s startling, its vividness forcing a kind of perceptive (and not conceptual) double-take. Within the created text (which is, of course, the product of the writer’s consciousness), it has an independence and autonomy, and we should marvel at its presence, not weigh its value by what we think it signifies.
And let’s not leave out drama; the German critic Leonore Ripke-Kuhn (no, I’m not making her up) writing in the early 20th century confidently announced, “Gone are the days of half-tones and subtle nuances, of scintillating highlights in word, sound or colour . . . and [an] all-embracing mingling of moods.” Death to Impressionism!
So here’s another set of related visual ideas; insubstantiality, lightness, 2-dimensionality - newness even, can all be indicative of something missing from the world. A world of incomplete meanings. And if your art isn’t capable of creating or reflecting a solid, worthwhile, stable vision it’s not much cop.
Well, the jury’s out on whether ‘hardness’ or impermeability in matters of meaning will guarantee survival - as we’ve already seen in part 2, a lack of flexibility in can consign your art to the dustbin of history; it’s art’s ability to adapt, to generate fresh meanings to successive epochs that will make it endure, not necessarily its non-negotiable characteristics. Reeds bending and breaking in the wind and all that - and Imagism (and the Nouveau Roman) broke. While variations on their aesthetic legacies continue to reverberate through literature, they aren’t much read any more. But the impulse to order has always been a preoccupation of literature as it grapples with the myriad ways it could represent the world.
f) PRINCIPLE 2: Disorder pretending to be order: of substance and surfaces, language and chaos
. . . reality is a nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there.
John Barth, novelist
Cloquet hated reality but realized it was still the only place to get a good steak.
Woody Allen, writer, film-maker, humourist and clarinettist
This section of the argument’s all about nervous writers - writers who aren’t 100% convinced that a career in literature’s all they’ve been promised - fame, wealth, immortality. They’re worried that the meaning that underpins art either fundamentally isn’t there, or ain’t what it was. Art is either a flimsy bridge built over chaos, or, worse, over nothing at all. These writers certainly don’t feel like they’re God, although most of them wish they were; they’re rather the plaything of forces they can’t control.
So let’s recap where we’ve got to.
The Imagists tried, for better or worse, to reproduce reality as honestly and economically as they could. And they believed, naively some might say, that representing the ‘realness’ of reality was possible, and that controlling it was in some measure attainable. It was at the very least an ambition they could aim for.
And the fact they were writing poetry, with its economy of expression and ellipses allowed them to purge a good deal of extraneous verbal baggage in a way not open to even the most fractured prose stylist. So we’ve got a set of associations all centred around ideas of hardness, permanence, concision and exactness.
But what happens if that’s all a sham - that there’s nothing inside that hard crust? The minute the writer suspects this, he’s letting his control falter. He’s no longer completely confident of his powers to order the world within his art. And there’s an entire body of literature based around the idea of artists ‘losing it’, of heroically battling against the forces that will see his meaning shrivel up and vanish. [1] And it can be a lonely job, fighting the forces of anarchy.
Perhaps the best known artist figure in literature is Shakespeare’s Prospero from ‘The Tempest’. The limits of his world are bounded by the shores of the island on which he’s been exiled. But within those boundaries, he’s in complete control of what’s going on. Using the alchemical knowledge in his books, he can raise storms, wreck boats - even make his daughter Miranda fall in love. So far so good. But all the time this white wizard is fighting against the disorder represented by the black witch Sycorax and her ‘son’ Caliban whose malign influence lurks at the back of the main plot.
So it’s perhaps not surprising the most common interpretation of the play is as an allegory of creativity [2] ; Prospero is the playwright, the island is the stage and his willing sprite Ariel is his imagination, oiling the wheels of the plot. And despite the problems caused by the fecklessness of the comic characters and their fondness for drink, and the legacy of Sycorax, Prospero manages to overcome these forces of randomness to engineer his desired outcome and restore order to the island - and the story.
But there’s quite a bit of tension evoked when we reckon there’s a possibility that he might quite literally lose the plot.
Reflecting this problem of writerly control, Shakespeare’s island world in ‘The Tempest’ is presented completely differently from that within an Imagist poem. There’s much talk of ‘spirits’, ‘shadows’ and ‘dreams’; shapes are never constant, but alter, fade and dissolve. And there’s a good deal of defamiliarization going on both for the play’s characters and its audience as Prospero weaves his spells and makes the fantastic real. No hardness here;
Our revels now are ended. These our actors
(As I foretold you) were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air,
And the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
I don’t reckon there’s another 11 lines as elegaic as this in the rest of literature, and there can be few lonelier artist figures than Prospero. His talent, though miraculous, sets him aside from the rest of humanity, and he has to renounce it before he can return to Milan and a ‘normal’ social situation “where/ Every third thought shall be my grave.”
This is commonly interpreted as Shakespeare’s farewell to his Muse; we know ‘The Tempest’ was one of his last plays, and our desire for conceptual neatness tends to write the rest of the story. But whether Shakespeare actually believed his art was heading for the dumpster of history - whether his meaning would survive, has been endlessly debated.
Of course, we now know he needn’t have worried; such vastly different poems as Milton’s ‘Comus’, Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ and Auden’s ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ all owe ‘The Tempest’ alone a huge debt. But in the absence of a collected edition of his works during his lifetime (and one was only published seven years after his death), the thought may have crossed his mind that his art might not play a part in posterity.
Shakespeare’s near contemporary Edmund Spenser certainly worried about this possibility. And he also allegorized the struggle in various bits of his mammoth tale of questing knights, ‘The Faerie Queene’. And once again, he uses a comparison between two landscapes to drive his point home.
Spenser contrasts what critics have called the “moralized landscape” of ‘Nature’ (the world) and ‘Art’ (the writer’s representation of it); the former is embodied in ‘The Garden of Adonis’, the latter in ‘The Bower of Bliss’. And what Spenser’s saying in his use of these horticultural metaphors is that the more Art deviates from Nature, the more transient it’s likely to prove.
The Garden “. . . sited was in fruitfull soyle of old” and:
In that same Gardin all the goodly flowres,
Wherewith dame Nature doth her beautifie,
And decks the girlonds of her paramoures,
Are fetcht . . .
This garden is completely free of artifice, and while Time is the sworn enemy of life in the garden (“For all that lives, is subject to that law/ All things decay in time, and to their end to draw”), it’s represented in the form of a loop, endlessly recycling the material of life into new configurations. So it’s obviously planted with hardy perennials. Adonis himself;
All be he subject to mortalitie,
Yet is eterne in mutabilitie,
And by succession made perpetuall.
Adonis is immortal because he will forever be reborn through the devices of good art, which is happy to describe things as they are. It’s the only sort of art that will last.
Now compare the world as it’s embodied in bad art. Spenser reckons the artist is never happy to depict things as they are. He’ll always gild the lily, wherein lies his downfall. Just take a look at these grapes;
And them amongst, some were of burnisht gold,
So made by art, to beautifie the rest,
. . . That the weake bowes, with so rich load opprest,
Did bow adowne, as over-burdened.
The image of a vine bending under the weight of its golden fruit illustrates how nature is distorted by artifice to the point of over-richness and even decadence. Compare this with Keats’s “mellow fruitfulness” in his ‘Ode to Autumn’, and it’s a whole different level of fecundity. Art in the Bower of Bliss “Was poured forth with plentifull dispence,/And made there to abound with lavish affluence,” since “as halfe in scorne/ Of niggard Nature, like a pompous bride/ [Art] Did decke her, and too lavishly adorn.” So Art is an unnaturally forced hothouse flower.
Then Spenser hammers home his main point having thus set the scene: art of this super-rich kind, he notes, cannot give rise to genuine emotions and therefore its meaning is suspect and cannot last. So the art of Love as practised in the Garden is characterised as “steadfast”; yet love in the Bower is simply “lewd” and “wastefull”. And gazing on this environment merely saps the questing knight’s energy and precious bodily fluids rather than inspiring him to greater feats of chivalry, which is an essential part of his job description. So while art may be attractive in its ability to transfigure reality into a sort of hyper-reality, it’s all a sham, and ultimately a waste of time. And so by implication, as readers, we’re not getting any worthwhile meaning out of art that’s too flowery or over-wrought. It’s all superficial - there’s nothing inside.
I can’t resist including another example of artistic over-richness which carries a similar purpose, this time from Ben Jonson’s satirical masterpiece ‘Volpone’, first published in 1607. Volpone, an out-and-out scoundrel who worships money, is enamoured of Celia, a woman whose virginity is proving hard to win. His wooing takes the form of poetry, describing the meal they will eat, and the contents of her bathtub prior to the consummation of their ‘love’;
The heads of parrots, tongues of nightingales,
The brains of peacocks and of ostriches
Shall be our food: and, could we get the phoenix,
Though nature lost her kind, she were our dish . . .
Thy baths shall be the juice of July-flowers,
Spirit of roses and of violets,
The milk of unicorns, and panther’s breath
Gather’d in bags and mixed with Cretan wines.
This catalogue of over-abundance not only transcends the bounds of reality (they don’t sell unicorn’s milk or bags of panther’s breath in our local Sainsbury’s, or even Waitrose), it’s positively bilious in its catalogue of sensual delights. It of course symbolizes the emptiness of Volpone’s love which is nothing more than carnal lust in fancy dress. And as if to prove the fact, he tries to rape Celia when these blandishments fail to win her over. It’s a further instance of art being used to compensate for a fundamental inner emptiness. And Celia might have chosen to paraphrase the lyrics of Shania Twain’s “That Don’t Impress Me Much” if only she’d had the presence of mind.
Footnotes:
1. Some writers, as we’ll see in the next section, aren’t too bothered by this. The group we’ll encounter in this section are.
2. And this is one of the biggest honey-traps in all literary criticism. Which we’ll skirt around without necessarily falling in, since it over-schematizes a work which offers far richer resonances than this single theme.
